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I've recently become familiar with Reflection, and have been experimenting with it, especially getDocComment(), however it appears that it only supports /** */ comment blocks.

/** foobar */
class MyClass{}

$refl = new ReflectionClass('MyClass');

// produces /** foobar */
echo $refl->getDocComment();

-Versus-

# foobar
class MyClass{}

$refl = new ReflectionClass('MyClass');

// produces nothing
echo $refl->getDocComment();

Is it not possible to capture this without resorting to any sort of file_get_contents(__FILE__) nonsense?

As per dader51's answer, I suppose my best approach would be something along these lines:

// random comment

#[annotation]

/**
 * another comment with a # hash
 */

#[another annotation]

$annotations
    = array_filter(token_get_all(file_get_contents(__FILE__)), function(&$token){
    return (($token[0] == T_COMMENT) && ($token = strstr($token[1], '#')));
});

print_r($annotations);

Outputs:

Array
(
    [4] => #[annotation]

    [8] => #[another annotation]

)
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4
  • Regarding my edit; it's still infeasible. Microtime tested it against the Zend_Controller_Front class file, (1007 lines, 3497 tokens) and it takes 0.010729945898056 on average (1000 iterations on my personal dev box) Commented Jun 11, 2011 at 7:44
  • did you get that right ? was wondering if you found a better way. Commented Nov 3, 2012 at 14:35
  • @dader No, a straight text parse of a given file may yield better performance but then you need to make sense of the results. Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 18:27
  • ok, I would propose this one, it may or may not be feasible. Using a recursive descent parser you could write a simple grammar that shall only distinguish between "mixed" code ( eventually up to the detail of class / method declaration, or statement ) and comments. Since you are not looking for an exhaustive parse tree, the grammar will stay simple. Then, you'll have a list of tokens that makes sense. Of course, it still uses the messy file_get_contents(FILE) approach... But I can't get rid of that, since everything in here is based on source code, not PHP logical structure. Commented Nov 14, 2012 at 17:31

5 Answers 5

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5

DocComments distinguish themselves by saying something about how your classes are to be used, compared to regular comments that could assist a developer in reading the code. That's also why the method isn't called getComment() instead.

Of course it's all text parsing, and someone just made a choice in docComments always being these multiline comments, but that choice has apparently been made, and reading regular comments is not something in the reflection category.

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1 Comment

Thanks C.Evenhuis; Well, that's unfortunate. I was curious because in my reading I heard about the PHP XP Framework supporting it, but after digging, I learned they had implemented their own reflection classes, which presumably adds support for it. docs.xp-framework.net/xml/doc?core/reflection
5

I was trying to do just a you a few days ago, and here is my trick. You can just use the php internal tokenizer ( http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.token-get-all.php ) , and then walk the array returned to select only the comments, here is a sample code :

$a = token_get_all(file_get_contents('path/to/your/file.php'));
print_r($a); // display an array of all tokens found in the file file.php

Here is a list of all tokens php recognize : http://www.php.net/manual/en/tokens.php

And the comment you will get by this method include ( from php.net site ) :

T_COMMENT : // or #, and /* */ in PHP 5

Hope it helps !

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2 Comments

Thanks dader51; That's great, except that its using the messy file_get_contents(__FILE__) approach for self reflection, and would be difficult to associate a given comment with a definition (class, function, etc.)
Yes I know for the file_get_contents issue, moreover using the tokenizer for this purpose will bring you to the field of parsing, which is in fact a whole country...
2

AFAIK, for a comment to become documentation it is needed to start with /** not even with standard multi-line comment.

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2

A doc comment as the name implies, is a documentation comment, not a standard comment, otherwise when you are grabbing comments for apps such as doxygen it will try to document any commented code from testing/debuggung, etc, which often gets left behind and is not important to the user of the API.

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As you can read here in the first User Contributed Note:

The doc comment (T_DOC_COMMENT) must begin with a /** - that's two asterisks, not one. The comment continues until the first */. A normal multi-line comment /*...*/ (T_COMMENT) does not count as a doc comment.

So only /** */ blocks are given by this method.

I don't know any other method with php to get the other comments as using file_get_contents and filter the comments with e.g. a regex

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1 Comment

Thanks Wessel Kranenborg; Darn. I had seen that mentioned elsewhere, I just didn't know if there was unmentioned support for non-doc-block comments. PHP should consolidate the user-comments on class methods when the comments are regarding an extended method, since getDocComment appears 3 times. I understand it's context, but still.

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